"But Howard gives us with his clearer mindThe gain of lessons new to all mankind;That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp,He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp.Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line,And named it fitly.—Be the honour thine!As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall,Let the world think of thee who taught it all."--Goethe, "Howards Ehrengedächtnis", 1821

The great cloud pioneer Luke Howard (1772-1864) first published on his cloud classifications in his papers "On the Modifications of Clouds and on the Principles of their Production Suspension and Destruction being the Substance of an Essay read before the Askesian1 Society in the Session 1802-3" in 1803, launching him from general normal obscurity into the ranks of the internationally known. He had done what Aristotle and many others down the years hadn't--classified (his "Modifications" of the title of his 11k-word effort) the moving mountains in the sky, making him a Linnaeus/Godfather of clouds, his nomenclature quickly adopted worldwide.

Howard, a pharmacist/chemist/meteorologist2 invoked a Latin nomenclature for his classification, which was a very smart idea, as Latin was already Latin (as it were) and didn't need to face the difficulties and obstructions of being translated into other languages, as was the case with the problematic Lamarckian system introduced just a year earlier which was phrased out in French and which encountered many problems in translation. Howard's universal nomenclature and his creative and poetic descriptions following deep study and endless sketches3 created a static environment from what was seen as an impossibly dynamic flow of changes in the structure of clouds.

According to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (the entry written by Richard Hambyn, the only person to write a book on Howard's naming of clouds), “...he proposed that every cloud belonged to one of three principal families, to which he had given the Latin names: cirrus (meaning “fiber” or “hair”), cumulus (“heap” or “pile”), and stratus (“layer” or “sheet”). In recognition of the essential instability of clouds, Howard also introduced a sequence of intermediate and compound modifications, such as cirrostratus and stratocumulus, in order to accommodate the regular transitions occurring between the cloud types...”

I've written about Howard elsewhere on this blog, and he comes back to me today for his odd place in the realm of highly-visual-works-published-without-illustration, or at least the first German language treatment of his work appears so, without benefit of a single image, as with the first of the three iterations of this paper in 1803 in the Philosophical Magazine. (It was in the second paper of 1803 that three images of clouds first appeared.) The paper appeared very quickly in Germany, published as "Ueber die Modification der Wolken" in 23pp in the November 1805 issue (volume 21) of the Annalen der Physik, though without any illustration. (Howard's "Versuch einer Naturgeschichte und Physik der Wolken" is published in the Annalen in 1815 also without an image, as do three of his other papers; the lone exception is one engraving illustrating his paper on waterspouts in volume 57.) I wonder why the article is unembellished--it is almost in a sense a defeat of the classifying idea, not to have some sort of visual reference for the new taxonomy. Perhaps it was a rush to publish, though if that were the case a return to the paper with engravings in a later issue would have been a good idea. In any event, it was a work that demanded pictures, and even though Howard was an accomplished cloud artist, there was little of that lovely work seen until the "third edition" of his essay appeared in 1832. Aside from the historic difficulty of rendering clouds in art, I do not know why it was the case that the earliest works on clouds passed by largely unillustrated,

No doubt there is room for a work on papers written on highly-visual ideas that should've been illustrated but weren't--that's partially how I cam to write this post to begin with, being thwarted by a very early call by Heinrich Brandes in the Annalen der Physik (1816, noted by Gerald R. North in the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, p. 290) for a system of making weather maps, but published without an example. And in pursuing that I came upon Heinrich Wilhem Dove's paper "Ueber Barometriche Minima" in the Annalen for 1828 on barometric pressure and the wind (where the wind seems to do a 360 turn generated by falling pressure), the cartographic elements of which were said to be illustrated on a folding engraved plate and though the symbols are there in a pre-non-representational-art sorta way, the map part wasn't....I mean, there's just no "amp" to the map, except for a scant reference to a city, and that's it. Anyway, it is a curious category that I'd rather read about than research.

Here's the unusual Dove illustration:

Images or no, the work by Howard was immortalized by Goethe, who admired and respected the man, painting clouds in poetry in 1817:

"To find yourself in the infinite,

You must distinguish and then combine;Therefore my winged song thanksThe man who distinguished cloud from cloud."

...and then proceeded to describe the main four (of the seven) main cloud types described by Howard:

"STRATUS

When o’er the silent bosom of the seaThe cold mist hangs like a stretch’d canopy;And the moon, mingling there her shadowy beams,A spirit, fashioning other spirits seems;We feel, in moments pure and bright as this,The joy of innocence, the thrill of bliss.Then towering up in the darkening mountain’s side,And spreading as it rolls its curtains wide,It mantles round the mid-way height, and thereIt sinks in water-drops, or soars in air.

CUMULUS

Still soaring, as if some celestial callImpell’d it to yon heaven’s sublimest hall;High as the clouds, in pomp and power arrayed,Enshrined in strength, in majesty displayed;All the soul’s secret thoughts it seems to move,Beneath it trembles, while it frowns above.

CIRRUS

And higher, higher yet the vapors roll:Triumph is the noblest impulse of the soul!Then like a lamb whose silvery robes are shed,The fleecy piles dissolved in dew drops spread;Or gently waft to the realms of rest,Find a sweet welcome in the Father’s breast.

NIMBUS

Now downwards by the world’s attraction driven,That tends to earth, which had upris’n to heaven;Threatening in the mad thunder-cloud, as whenFierce legions clash, and vanish from the plain;Sad destiny of the troubled world! but see,The mist is now dispersing gloriously:And language fails us in its vain endeavour —The spirit mounts above, and lives forever."

(Full text here for the illustrated third edition of 1865. And, yes, this post is not illustrated.)

2. According to the OED, “meteorology” goes back quite a way as a word, popping up in 1563; “meteoroloician” appears in 1580, and “meteorologist” in 1683.)

3. “The location of many of the sketches gives us an initial hint of their Romanticism. For many years Howard travelled between London and the Lake District in order to capture the full range of what he termed ‘cloud modifications’, training himself in the notoriously difficult art of depicting clouds, of fixing them as they changed “

Howard begins his 1803 paper so:

“If the necessary pursuit If clouds were the mere result of the condensation of var pour in the masses of atmosphere which they occupy if their variations were produced by the movements of the atmosphere alone then indeed might the study of them be deemed an useless pursuit of shadows an attempt to describe forms which being the sport of winds must be ever varying and therefore not to be defined. But however the erroneous admission of this opinion may have operated to prevent attention to them the case is not so with clouds. They are subject to certain distinct modifications produced by the general causes which effect all the variations of the atmosphere they are commonly as good visible indications of the operation of these causes as is the countenance of the state of a person's mind or body...”